TSG is pleased to recognize a selection of payments companies for their exceptional performance across several key areas, critical to a successful payment platform. Read the press release, and see below for the winners and runner-ups in each category.
Powered by TSG’s GEM platform, GEM uses pings and real transactions to monitor each gateway’s performance from over twenty different global locations 24/7/365. All transaction metrics are calculated by utilizing real TSG cards, at real TSG merchants, to complete transactions.
Visa Inc. topped revenue and earnings estimates for its fiscal first quarter Thursday after the bell, helped by sequential improvements in payments volumes, cross-border volumes and processed transactions. The credit card and payments giant posted net income of $1.42 a share on revenue of $5.7 billion. In the same period a year ago the company posted earnings of $1.46 a share on sales of $6.1 billion. It reported net income of $2.9 billion. Visa's board also approved a new $8 billion share repurchase plan.
May require account to read. Mastercard Inc. shares were up 3% in Thursday trading after the payments giant topped expectations with its latest results and pointed to improving U.S. spending trends in January relative to the end of last year. The company’s revenue for the fourth quarter decreased to $4.12 billion from $4.41 billion, though it exceeded the FactSet consensus that called for $4.0 billion. Chief Executive Michael Miebach called out “very strong e-commerce sales” on the company’s earnings call, though weak international travel trends continued to weigh on lucrative cross-border spending.
“While we are still seeing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, trends continued to steadily improve in the fourth quarter,” said Stephen J. Squeri, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “Card Member spending has continued to recover, and non-travel and entertainment spend exceeded pre-COVID levels for the second consecutive quarter. We continued to expand our merchant network, as we sustained virtual parity coverage in the United States and added more than 3.7 million merchants internationally in 2020. Our disciplined approach to risk management enabled us to maintain our best-in-class credit performance, with fourth-quarter delinquencies and write-off rates at some of the lowest levels we’ve seen in a few years.
NCR Corporation, a global enterprise technology provider for the financial, retail and hospitality industries, and Cardtronics, the world’s largest non-bank ATM operator and service provider, today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which NCR will acquire all outstanding shares of Cardtronics for $39.00 per share in an all-cash transaction with an enterprise value of approximately $2.5 billion, including debt. The transaction has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies.
Fast, a startup that provides online checkout and identity products, announced that it has closed a $102 million Series B. The new funding event was led by Stripe, a previous investor in Fast. Stripe, an online payments giant, also led Fast’s Series A last year, a deal worth $20 million. Fast has raised $124 million to date, it said in a release. TechCrunch reached out to Fast for comment regarding its growth pace. The company shared that gross merchandise volume (GMV) processed by its checkout service has “more than tripled each month,” adding that it expects that “trend to continue and increase.”
May require account to read. Rachel Carmack thought Apple Pay was the answer to her pandemic-induced germaphobia. No more plastic credit cards, with their button-pushing and receipt-signing. Instead, she would simply wave her phone to pay for things. Her plan hasn’t gone so smoothly. On two trips to a fast-food drive-through in Jonesboro, Ark., cashiers grabbed her phone when she stuck it out the window. On another, she had to give the cashier an Apple Pay tutorial before she could get her order. “If you just hold the reader out I can hold my phone up to it,” she told the stumped employee.
Bitcoin jumped as much as 14% on Friday to a two-week high after Tesla Inc chief Elon Musk tagged the cryptocurrency in his Twitter biography. Musk wrote simply “#bitcoin” in his biography on the social media site. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency was up 10.2% at $36,901 as of 1005 GMT. The billionaire entrepreneur, followed by 43.8 million users on Twitter, has a record of making market-moving comments on the site.
In a four-year campaign to root out risks to China’s financial system, regulators have set upon their biggest target yet: the world’s largest financial technology sector. All three financial watchdogs have made it their primary goal this year to curb the “reckless” push of technology firms into finance, taking aim at a sector where loose oversight fueled breakneck growth for companies such as Ant Group Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Wechat Pay. They have the green-light from President Xi Jinping, who in November called on regulators to “dare to” master their supervisory role.
Check, a startup building software tools for digitizing business payrolls, emerged from two years in stealth mode this morning with the announcement that it has raised $35 million in a fresh funding round. The round was led by investments from Thrive Capital and the digital payments giant Stripe. No valuation for the startup was disclosed. With this new round, the startup has raised a total of $44 million.
Digital currency exchange Coinbase announced Thursday that it’s seeking to go public through a direct listing, skirting the traditional IPO route. Founded in 2012, Coinbase has grown to become the largest digital currency exchange in the U.S., and is hitting the public market amid renewed investor interest in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is trading over $32,000, up over 260% in the past year. Coinbase is jumping on the trend of companies choosing direct listings rather than IPOs to avoid diluting their existing shareholders and handing over cheap stock to new investors.
German neobank N26 hired Dr. Jan Kemper as its new chief financial officer (CFO) as the Berlin-headquartered FinTech looks toward a future initial public offering (IPO). Kemper will join N26 in the second half of 2021, replacing co-founder Maximilian Tayenthal, who will become co-CEO with Co-Founder Valentin Stalf, N26 said in a press release. The former CFO of Zalando SE, one of Europe’s most successful eCommerce retailers, Kemper was instrumental in leading the company’s IPO in 2014 on the Frankfurt stock exchange. In his eight years at the startup, he helped grow market capitalization to 11 billion euros from 2010 to 2017.
Nubank has raised $400 million in a Series G funding round that values the Brazilian digital banking powerhouse at $25 billion, making it among the five most valuable financial institutions in Latin America. Led by GIC, Whale Rock and Invesco, with participation from Sequoia, Tencent, Dragoneer and Ribbit, the round brings Nubank's total funding to $1.2 billion in seven years. Since a $400 million Series F in July 2019, the company’s customer base has grown from 12 million to 34 million people, in part thanks to expansion beyond Brazil and into Mexico and Colombia.
Melio, which provides a platform for SMBs to pay other companies electronically using bank transfers, debit cards or credit — along with the option of cutting paper checks for recipients if that is what the recipients request — has closed $110 million in funding at a valuation that the company said was now $1.3 billion. The company’s focus to date has been building and growing a system to replace the paper invoices, snail mail and bank transfers that might take multiple days to clear and still dominate payments for small and medium enterprises.
Mastercard has imposed a five-fold increase on credit card interchange fees charged for UK online purchases from the EU, following Britain's withdrawal from the European Union. Prior to Brexit, UK merchants and card holders benefitted from a 0.3% cap on credit card interchange fees imposed by the European Commission. But with the country withdrawing from Europe, these fees will increase to 1.5%, as payments between the UK and the European Economic Area are now deemed “inter-regional”.
Men's clothing store Bonobos has suffered a massive data breach exposing millions of customers' personal information. Walmart bought Bonobos in 2017 for $300 million to offer its clothing on Jet.com. BleepingComputer reported the breach occurred after a cloud backup of their database was downloaded by a threat actor. In January, a threat actor known as ShinyHunters, who is notorious for hacking online services and selling stolen databases, posted the full Bonobos database to a free hacker forum, the report said.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog created after the 2008 financial meltdown and largely muzzled in the Trump era, is poised to start barking again. The agency will focus first on enforcing legal protections for distressed renters, student borrowers and others facing growing debt that its previous leadership has been lax about imposing during the pandemic. But the CFPB — which President Biden has tapped 38-year-old Rohit Chopra to lead — is also likely to take an unprecedentedly tough line against industry giants it finds engaging in abusive practices, former agency officials advising the Biden team say.
Based on what we know so far, hackers didn't steal as much personal data in 2020 as they did in previous years, but that doesn't mean they weren't able to make plenty of money. According to a report released Thursday by the Identity Theft Resource Center, hackers and identity thieves used stolen passwords and personal information to profit in new ways from your information. The report, issued to coincide with Data Privacy Day, is a good reminder that stolen personal data has a long afterlife
U.S. consumer spending fell for a second straight month in December amid renewed business restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19 and a temporary expiration of government-funded benefits for millions of unemployed Americans. Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, slipped 0.2% last month after dropping 0.7% in November. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast consumer spending decreasing 0.4% in December.
The U.S. economy contracted at its sharpest pace since World War II in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic depressed consumer spending and business investment, pushing millions of Americans out of work and into poverty. The Commerce Department’s snapshot of fourth-quarter gross domestic product on Thursday also showed the recovery from the pandemic losing steam as the year wound down amid a resurgence in coronavirus infections and exhaustion of nearly $3 trillion in relief money from the government.
The world economy is gearing up for a strong recovery from the pandemic in 2021 after shrinking considerably less than initially feared last year, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday, though it warned that the outlook is subject to exceptional uncertainty. Global output is projected to grow 5.5% this year, up from the IMF’s October forecast of a 5.2% increase. Last year’s estimated contraction of 3.5% was smaller than October’s forecast for a 4.4% contraction. China was the only major economy to grow last year, expanding by 2.3% amid effective containment measures and forceful economic support, the IMF said.
Federal Reserve officials left interest rates near zero on Wednesday and pledged to continue making huge bond purchases as the central bank tries to help the economy weather the continuing pandemic, warning that a surge in the coronavirus has slowed progress toward a full rebound. “The pace of the recovery in economic activity and employment has moderated in recent months, with weakness concentrated in the sectors most adversely affected by the pandemic,” the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee said in its January policy statement.
Shift4 Payments, a leading provider of payment processing and technology solutions, announced that it is rebranding its eCommerce platform as Shift4Shop. The company also announced an innovative new pricing model that provides its premium eCommerce services at no charge when merchants use the company’s payment processing solution. Shift4Shop, previously known as 3dcart and acquired by Shift4 in November 2020, is a feature-rich eCommerce platform serving businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries across the globe.
Vistaprint, the marketing and design partner to small businesses, announced a collaboration with PayPal to bring innovative and safe touch-free payment solutions to small businesses across the country. Touch-free payments allow small business owners to process payments for goods and services without having to handle cash or credit cards, and avoiding physical contact with customers during the transaction. Through this collaboration, Vistaprint is enabling customers to leverage PayPal’s touch-free payment solution through a collection of customizable Vistaprint marketing products bearing their unique QR code.
FLEETCOR Technologies, Inc., a leading global business payments company, announced it has acquired Roger, a global accounts payable (AP) cloud software platform for small businesses. The acquisition will extend FLEETCOR’s portfolio of accounts payable automation solutions to small businesses, helping them automate their manual payment processes. The acquisition provides FLEETCOR with a proven, modern automation platform for B2B online bill payment. The platform helps SMBs gather and scan invoices and receipts, eliminate manual data entry using machine learning technology, approve and execute payments, setup automated workflows, and sync to accounting systems like QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Xero, and others in real time.
PNC Bank N.A. announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Tempus Technologies, Inc., a leading payment gateway provider that delivers secure and innovative payment-processing solutions for businesses of all sizes. The acquisition of Tempus Technologies, which is subject to legal close, will expand PNC Treasury Management's robust payments platform, enabling corporate clients to manage payables and receivables through a single channel, spanning all payment rails.
BHMI, a leading provider of payments software and creator of the Concourse Financial Software Suite®, announced that Everlink Payment Services Inc. (Everlink), a leading provider of payments solutions and services for credit unions, banks, and small/medium enterprises (SMEs) throughout Canada, will be migrating to the latest version of Concourse to further bolster its payment processing functions. BHMI has been a partner with Everlink since 2003, supporting the company’s back-office payment needs.
Cardknox, an omnichannel payment gateway, known for its flexible and robust integrations, this year has directed much of its efforts toward supporting a wider array of e-commerce payment methods. Retailers who integrate with Cardknox will now have the ability to offer Google Pay as a payment method to their online shoppers at checkout. Google Pay, available to Android users, is a digital wallet and online payment system that allows users to save their credit, debit, gift cards, and loyalty cards to the app in order to streamline and speed up the checkout process.
Electronic Payments, a leading payments and point of sale (POS) provider, has always been committed to helping small businesses expand and grow with their innovative solutions that are developed and supported in house. With this latest announcement, the company has reinforced their commitment to supporting merchants by providing free Exatouch® POS bundles. The programs help retail merchants and quick service restaurants (QSRs) save money on hardware costs, cloud and third-party app fees, and training and support services.
New York-based Trustco Bank is seeing new levels of digital adoption and engagement following the launch of an enhanced digital banking platform from Fiserv, Inc., a leading global provider of payments and financial services technology solutions. “When COVID-19 hit people expected progress to be put on hold, but for us it was the opposite,” said Robert J. McCormick, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Trustco Bank. “We invested in our digital experience and the reaction from our customers and staff has been overwhelmingly positive.”
Atlantic-Pacific Processing Systems NV, Corp. (APPS), a fintech holding company providing technology and financial services solutions, has completed the acquisition of cloud-based software company Paynomix, LLC, making Paynomix a wholly owned subsidiary. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Paynomix founder and payments wiz Brent Gephart will join APPS as its new chief information officer. Paynomix will continue developing and implementing SaaS payment solutions focused on helping businesses maximize customer interactions, streamline operations and drive revenues.